The whole thing started so simply. I never meant for it to end up in this bog of complications.

I was sitting around one Monday evening, jamming and drinking port with my buddies Roger and Tim. We are starting this Stooges-type rock band which has at various times been named such things as Crime Desire, Cannibal Rape Job, Romilar Jag and Cigar Box Joe Bob & the Clap, and is currently called National Dust, since we are going through our down-to-rudimentals period. Tim plays rhythm guitar, Roger

sings and blows flute, and we have a couple of other cats not present this evening on lead and bass, although our drummer recently split because we were too far out for him. I blow harp and sing lead on some tunes. This night we were rehearsing some of my new killer originals such as “Please Don’t Burn My Yoyo,” “A Race of Citizens,” “He Gave You the Finger, Mabel,” "After My Misspent Youth,” and “Barricuda Anthem,” which was my own revolutionary juvenile delinquent philippic:

Hey motherfucker!

Hey motherfucker!

All you do is sit on your can

Get out in the streets and proove you’re a man

We been sittin’ still too long,

It’s time to pull the lever

On the ones that stole the ground from unborn feet forever!

Rehearsing with just three bandmembers and only one guitar was not the easiest chore in the world, but it got looser as we got drunker, and just as things really began to cook I was siezed with an inspiration that seemed brilliant at the time but was to have a dire denouement. Huffing and shrieking through my Hohrier Marine Band, I gazed around Roger’s room strewn with smudged manuscripts, tattered skin mags, half-empty bottles and records with wine stains in the grooves, and suddenly I saw, leaning dusty in a corner, an old alto sax that Roger had borrowed from his brother-in-law months ago with the intention of branching out from flute and never quite gotten around to.

Instantly I dropped the harp, which has such a limited palette for an experimental artist anyway, and snatched up the horn. Just holding it in my hands and toying with the keys was like a revelation, flashing me back to my high school days and lessons on another borrowed alto. Sitting in the practice room of the music store with the patient, plodding instructor trying to teach me scales and embrochure technique, when all I wanted to do was cut loose with a searing Bronx blast that would blow the roof off the place. A saxophone has always been a symbol of power with me, ever since the days I first sat chilling and rocking to things like John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass while staring in awe at the pictures of the man on the jacket, awash in yellow and purple lights, blowing the truest testament in history through that big honking horn.

Days home from school faking flu I would put Trane on loud as my Sears Silvertone could blare, and stand up on a hassock reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at the top of ray lungs, pretending I was in a North Beach or Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Music fueled me, although I was just dimly realizing that I was at core a verbal child. In the shower I wailed and whammed at imaginary keyboards, drums, later guitars, but most especially saxes, emulating my heroes with 20-minute atonal ragas that soared to their stormiest climaxes when the hot water ended.

I also took lessons at various times on real guitars, pianos, trumpet, drums and the aforementioned sax, never meeting with much success because I was always too fired with the imperatives of inner song to bother learning music book drivel like “Old Black Joe” and “My Bonnie.” Afternoons with the alto I would practice scales for five or ten minutes, feel them sliding ineluctibly into improvisation, wail awhile and then light a Chesterfield, settle back hunched in my chair with my axe lying casually on my crossed legs, fingers of one hand still at the keys, listening to my Jackie McLean records, dreaming. Later I began to smoke grass and in the random, perfect riffings of euphoria actually sorted out Gershwin’s “Summertime.” I joined a Johnny and the Hurricanes type band for one afternoon; couldn’t play “Night Train” or “Let’s Get One,” but sure did wail, even if the reed was cracked and its tip chipped and bitten away a good half-inch.

The reed on Roger’s brother-in-law’s alto was new but stiff and dusty and had probably never been used. A “professional” musician would have taken it off the instrument and sucked it until it was limber enough for proper tone, but I was in too much of a hurry to bother with any of that Julliard conservatory shit. Something infantile about sucking on a piece of wood, anyway. I just hauled the damn thing up from the corner and started working out, HONK! BLAT! SQUEEEE! Rippling fingertips working the keys, gravel vocalisms tearing out, experimenting with loud rhythmic redundancies on one or two notes, bop jive crossbreeds between Illinois Jacquet and Albert Ayler and licks akin to Stooges guitar riffs. Sounded great to me, and Roger and Tim were enthusiastic as hell at first but after ten or fifteen minutes they seemed to grow a little weary, stopped playing and sort of stared at lint on the carpet or the silent Dick Van Dyke Show TV screen between glugs on the port. Not that that bothered me in the slightest; the flow of my high-energy inspiration is so constant and sustained that I don’t really expect any of my peters to keep up with me. Now if it was Trane or Pharoah I was lifting with...

Anyway, the evening ended in utter confusion as we all got so drunk we passed into that sometimes blissfull, sometimes disastrous state of ambulatory unconsciousness where you have to make phonecalls the next morning for your own edification, hoping you haven’t stumbled into some absurd gaffe. I vaguely recall Tim driving me home as I kept yammering and yelping through the sax, becoming less coherent with each note, until at last I was blowing a single pure true note with a vocal laugh running through it, pausing only for breath. Tim yelled at me to shut the fuck up, to which I replied: “You must be kidding,” and only stopped to scoop myself out of the car, drag myself up the stairs of my apartment house and fall fully-dressed into total oblivion on my bed.

That night I had a strange and wonderful dreamf It was one of the best dreams of my entire life. I was in a vast auditorium modeled after the little theatre of my old junior college, filled to the dusty windows with people, and all alone on the stage I stood with my sax, fingering and blatting it every whichaway, blowing out the crassest garble that even I had ever heard. The audience was getting restless, and a few minor mutterings were beginning to be heard. But suddently I began to have a very strange feeling, and I realized all at once that it was the hand of Ohnedaruth himself passing cooly over my brow. In that instant I was struck with the divine insight that the way to play more is to play less, that I was overblowing and dissipating my energies. So I relaxed, and began to apply both breath pressure and finger movements in a calmer, more deliberate, meditative manner. And that was when the breathiest, most sublime tune began to emanate from my instrument, from me. It was fantastic, it was a holy moment. I sounded exactly like Pharoah Sanders. The audience sat hushed in awe. The gentle, strong current of the melody wound on and on, growing more godlike with each measure, and my euphoria, increasing with it, was beyond all measure, was so intense it was almost post-emotional. At its peak I realized that, through the windings and turnings of song, I had somehow begun to play “The Girl From Ipanema.” But it sounded just as holy.

I woke up the next day with one of the more notable hangovers of the month and a memory made of swiss cheese. The sight of the saxophone leaning up ’gainst the wall of my own bedroom dumbfounded me, and I immediately called up Roger and demanded: “What the fuck’s this saxophone doing at my house?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Well, what the fuck happened last night?”

“I was gonna ask you that!”

There was no hope of cognition. It’s that bad Gallo Port; it’ll fry your brain just like a wino’s. That’s why all us teenagers like it so much. Roger said maybe he and Tim would be over to drink and watch some TV a little later, and I hung up and set about trying to get myself together. I don’t usually drink in the morning, but today the quality of my hangover was so extraordinarily intense that I was nearly blind, and spent about three-quarters of an hour walking around the house in circles and staring at the purplish-black fuzz in the air before deciding to break down and break in the Jack Daniel’s for breakfast. It was good too, and as my head began to clear I sat in the rocking chair by the living room window playing with the sax and remembering my Jackie McLean days. Finally I put my mouth to the embrochure and gave an experimental “TOOT!” Not bad. Gradually, mindful of the throbbing in my head, I began to rip off a few barnyard squawks.

Suddenly I saw a wizened shadow pass on the shade beside me. I stopped playing, quietly stood up, lifted one of the blinds ever-so-slightly and peered out. There stood my landlady, all four feet of white-haired crone, leaning on her cane right in front of the door to my apartment, listening. I laid the sax down and sat back in my chair with my hands folded in my lap, not making a sound. At length she went away.

I had had trouble with this old apparition before. Ever since the previous managers, a retired couple, had left when the husband had a heart attack, and Mrs. Brown had taken over, she and I had been at loggerheads. The first time it was quite civil. I was playing The American Revolution by David Peel and the Lower East Side at top volume, apd she came and so-sweetly told me that another tenant had complained. Fine.

I turned down. The next time it was Sir Lord Baltimore: I listened to a whole side with headphones and speakers both on before realizing that she had been banging on the door with all her strength for 20 minutes. When I answered it she launched into a tirade rife with threats of eviction, but my blood was fired with Sir Lord Baltimorean feedback and I just screamed at her and slammed the door.

All this was complicated by two things. One was her son, a baby-faced weakling of the type that always has a purple swath through his stubble after he shaves, who married the bitchiest Student Council socialite of a blonde from my highschool and spent much of his time in loud fights with her. It amused the whole building to hear her browbeat and him whine, and she always won. It was clear that he was still tied to his madre’s apron strings, because they accepted free rent from his mother, even though it was plain that his wife hated her (although in truth it seemed like she hated the whole world).

The other factor making it difficult for me to kick out the jams in peace was that the apartment right under the one occupied by myself and my own sainted mother was rented to somebody else I went to highschool with, namely one of the stupidest, ugliest pugs I ever knew, named Butch Dugger, and he just happened to have grown up to be a cop. A kid who lived in the apartment house told me once that Dugger had been heard saying that he remembered me from school, had never liked me, and now had sworn that he was going to “get me”, his words,

Now, I’m not particularly paranoid. All I know is that one night when I had a friend over juicing it up, my friend tapped me on the shoulder right in the middle of “Sister Ray” and when I took off my headphones he said that somebody was banging on the front door. When I opened it there were four cops standing there in uniform, claiming that somebody, they wouldn’t say who, had complained about the noise, and since it was after ten o’clock on a Sunday evening they would have to take my name. My room was still full of marijuana fumes and my friend was stoned on reds, so I told them who I was to get them out of there, and they left.

But that was all in the past, and I didn’t have any dope in the house now, and besides it rankled me that my landlady should stand outside my door spying on me in the United States of America where a man has the right to play free jazz at high noon. I had heard other tenants talking about how both she and her son had been caught at odd hours, stooping slightly by peoples’ windows, listening to see what went on within.

I sat and mulled it awhile, reaching the halfway point in my fifth of Jack’s, and then I called my girlfriend up on the phone for a little fun. Her sister answered, and I didn’t say a word but launched immediately into a squealy version ot “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the horn that would have done Yusef Lateef proud. She was shocked at first, thinking it was a crank call I guess, but when I told her who it was she handed the phone to Candy, my girlfriend, and I repeated my performance.

By the time I was halfway through the first rendition, though, the landlady had come galloping up, or as close to a gallop as one can get with a chrome cane, and commenced to bang unremittingly on the door with her gnarled fist. It made a pretty good rhythm track, in fact, but Candy and her sister couldn’t hear that. When I started playing for Candy, Mrs. Brown began to yell: “Hey, in there! Stop that racket and open this door right now!”

But I finished my recital, Candy laughing, and told her to hold on a second. I answered the door with axe in hand. The landlady was fuming: “What are you doing in there?”

“I’m practicing my saxophone,” I said with a smile of innocence, holding it out a bit so she could see. She was not mollified.

“Are you havin’ a drunk party in there?”

Now I started to get mad. Every goddam time she interrupts me she accuses me of having a “drunk party,” and the worst part is she never does it when I actually am having one. Once she called me up and said this on a Sunday afternoon while I was watching a rather flighty college professor who looked like Woody Allen play piano sonatas by an obscure homosexual composer and then explain their programmatic content in purple prose, on TV. “No,” I bristled, adrenaline rising, "I'm just playing my sax as you can fucking well see!”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 76.

She put her foot half on the doorsill and half on the carpet* leaning in. “Don’t use that language and tone with me, young man!”

“Don’t try to barge into my apartment like that, I didn’t tell you you could come in here! You’re trespassing!”

We were both getting a bit crazy now. We had been dreaming of this confrontation for months, though I was gone much of the time, attending drunk parties in Los Angeles. She served: “I thought I’d got you outa here, you young scamp!”

“Well, you old bitch,” I cackled, my eyes fairly popping out of my head. “You didn’t!”

“Ooohh,” she seethed, waving her pallid little fist and brittle old arm in the air, “I, I, I’ll smack you!”

“Go ahead!” I howled. I was really starting to get into it. I could see myself now, suing a crippled 78 year old woman for assault and battery.

“I’ll call the police!”

“On what charge?” I brayed.

“Disturbing the peace . . . disturbing my apartment house!”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Anyway, why don’t you just shut up and get outa here and stop bothering me. I’m leaving in two weeks and then I’ll never have to look at your ugly face again.”

• “I give you three days to get out!”

“Fuck you, you can’t do that!”

She was really frustrated; she began to reach for things. “I’ll tell your mother what you do!”

“So what?”

“I’ll get my son to come up here and beat you up!”

“Ahh, your faggot son won’t do nothin’,” I snarled, and slammed the door. She left, and I went back to the phone where Candy waited in perplexity: “What was all that?”

“Nothing,” I laughed. “My landlady is really crazy.” Though I was certainly not in the best shape myself. My hangover had me trembling all over, and there ,was a slight tremor in my voice.

But I knew everything was going to be all right. I didn’t play the sax any more, though as I kept drinking I ran through endless fantasies of further confrontations with her. Eventually Roger and Tim arrived, and we went out for more booze, although Tim was back to his old regimen of reds and whites. In fact as he proudly brought his stash out to show us he fumbled, dropping thebag. The little pills rolled and scattered everywhere, and in his condition he only managed to retrieve about three-foujths of them. I made a note of the ones that rolled under the couch and the chair, planning to gather them later.

After putting what he found of his stuff-away, he picked up the sax. I had. already told them about the scene with the landlady, and Tim blew a few farting honks. Roger jumped on him: “Don’t do that, man, we don’t want a hassle here.”

“Yeah,” I said, “what are you gonna tell my landlady if she comes back to the door?”

“Why, hand it to her and say, Here, if you think you can play any better, go ahead and try!”

“No,” we both yelled at him, “no! Let’s just be cool.” And being cool, he and Roger started a quiet jam on guitar and flute. I listened at first, sipping my Jack’s and water, but the more I listened the more I wanted to play too, and finally, siezed by the muse and drink, I yelled “Fuck it!” And picked up the sax and started to wail.

It took her even less time to arrive this time than the last. She’d probably been sitting in her apartment, just like me, wondering when we’d get a chance to tangle again. How romantic. She was banging with both fists now, hollering at the top of her lungs. I answered the door, as before, with the sax still in my hands. But this time, Trane laid his hand on my brow once more, and I didn’t need paltry words to reply.

“I told you about that racket — ”

HONK!

“I’m not going to put up with any more of —”

HONK! HONK! HONKHONKHONKSQUACKSQUONK!

“Will you put that damn thing down and listen to —”

SQUEEEE-ONKl SHKRIEEEE! GRRUGHRRGLONKEE-ERNK!

I advanced on her with it, backing her out the door, pausing only for breath. She turned and fled. “All right,” she gasped, running to the door of her apartment and opening the screen. “I’m gonna call the police.”

I don’t know what got into me. Partially it was the booze, partially the dream I’d had the night before, partially pure inspiration and rage at the abridgement of my inalienable right to jam. I chased her down the balustrade, wailing all the way, and right into her apartment. I ran up to her as she was dialing the phone, and smiled at the look of terror in her eyes as I advanced on her blowing like a hurricane. Rock out!

I stood right over her, jiving and honking in her face as she leaned farther and farther back, dropping the phone and grimacing in fright. She never lost her cane, though.

“What’slthe matter here, ma’am?”

It was Butch Dugger himself, standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves with a half-eaten tuna sandwich in his hand, roused from TV on his day off fromhvork.

“This boy,” she panted, “he’s attacking me! He’s like a mad dog! Get him off!”

“Right away, ma’am,” said Butch through clenched teeth, laying his tuna sandwich next to a porcelain tulip on her livingroom table. And he came up and strong-armed me from behind, grabbing my arms and twisting them up behind my head so that I dropped the sax with a clatter on her carpet. As he was pushing me out the door, I saw her go to the kitchen, get a napkin and put it under the sandwich. And I heard him tell her to call the police station and tell officer Betancourt that officer Dugger said to come out.

He pushed me down the stairs and face first onto the lawn and I felt his knee in my back. As I lay there chewing crabgrass I heard a screen door slam; his wife was bringing him his handcuffs. Still keeping his knee in my back, he put them on me and then got up. I could see Roger and Tim across the street, moving quietly in the direction of their car. They weren’t looking at me. I didn’t blame them.

A minute later a gold-fleck patrol car came roaring up, two cops jumped out and ran over, as if there were some major emergency. One had his nightstick out. Mrs. Brown must have made quite a phone call. Dugger spoke: “Here ’e is. Assault with intent to commit bodily harm, maybe attempted rape, maybe something else. Watch out for ’im, he’s a sick one. I think he’s been taking LSD. I’m gonna go down and get a warrant — I think I’ve smelled marijuana fumes cornin’ outa that apartment before.”

So they took me and they booked me, for assault and eventually possession of dangerous drugs, and threw me in the tank. I sat down and lit a cigarette, and a tough looking black dude about 30 years old bummed one from me. “Whut you in for?”

“Being ahead of my time.”

He just looked at me. For a second I thought he was going to laugh, but he didn’t. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”